Writing about, inspired by, and tangentially related to the work of the great Trinidadian Marxist

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Thatcher is Dead, Long Live Thatcher: Misogyny and the Neoliberal Order

A fully neoliberalized world
would radiate disaster triumphant, but a fully neoliberalized world is
impossible. Your staunchest neoliberal—say, Margaret Thatcher—does not want the
entirety of the social to fall under a biopolitical calculus, to become priced
or monetized. Rather, the neoliberal order requires the proliferation and
production of common socialities capable of maintaining life in a world
instituted to be indifferent to life’s maintenance. After having pulverized
society in that famous quote, for example, Thatcher tells us that the family
remains as the site upon which “individual men and women” should “cast…their
problems.” Without positive externalities like the family, the neoliberalized world
would simply collapse (as Polanyi argued of classical liberalism years ago) and
many lives with it. The neoliberal state relies upon common socialities—everyday
ways of organizing our worlds—to surrogate for the services (which we think)
the state used to provide. We who
resist neoliberal capitalism want to think of these common socialities as
maintaining a certain relation of exteriority to the neoliberal order, and,
indeed, as offering a grounds of resistance to it. The commons is, after all,
the new rallying cry of a left that doesn’t want to say communist. And, sure,
some of these modalities of being-in-common do bear traces of utopian
possibilities. But many don’t. The neoliberal order grounds itself in such
to-hand modes of social organization and sets them to work to absorb the shock
of the state’s abdication of responsibility for performing basic social upkeep.

All of this is to say that
we, in our everyday lives, engender the conditions of possibility for the
continuance of the neoliberal normal. We saw this, ironically and horribly, in
a too-common response to Thatcher’s death. “Cunt,” “bitch,” “ding dong the
witch is dead”—it was a veritable festival of misogynistic name-slinging.
Believe me, I have no sympathy for the devil, and I think Thatcher lived about
40 years too long. But exorcising Thatcher with a misogynistic curse is the
best way of ensuring that she will continue to haunt us.

This is because neoliberalism
thrives on structural misogyny. Gender is one powerful mechanism by which the
neoliberal order converts our potentially resistant common worlds into positive
externalities, into social formations functional for the maintenance of life in
an unlivable world. After all, the state’s abdication of its responsibility for
social care does not mean that care disappears. (Well, for some it does.) The
burden of care, rather, is displaced (in part) to the family, as Thatcher made
clear, which means that this burden is displaced disproportionately (if not
entirely) onto women caught up within patriarchal family structures. For poor
women of color in particular, neoliberal structural adjustments create
conditions in which the routinized hyper-exploitation of unsalaried care labor
intensifies. To take an example geographically proximate to me, consider Rahm
Emmanuel’s impending shutdown of over 50 Chicago public schools. Kids slated to
travel to out-of-neighborhood schools will have to get up earlier. Maybe they’ll
have to be dropped off or picked up. Maybe they’ll have to travel through
inhospitable neighborhoods or feel sad and isolated in their new worlds. Maybe
they won’t learn as well and so require extra hours of tutoring. Maybe
available social services (one or two meals a day, say, or after-school care)
will be cut. Negotiating these transformations will require new investments of
time, affective energy, attention, and (if it is available, and even if it is
not) money. Someone is going to
surrogate for the dismantled structure of care. It’s not hard to guess at the
demographic profile of this someone.

There is, of course, no
transcendental historical principle mandating that women’s care labor should
surrogate for the state’s instituted carelessness. The neoliberal order simply
uses—and, true, reproduces through legislative and fiscal programs—the
structural misogyny of the North Atlantic patriarchal family. It found this
patriarchal structure to-hand, and it continues to find it to-hand. It found
this structure reproduced every time an anti-austerity radical called Thatcher
a “cunt.” Meanwhile, Fox News was going gaga over Thatcher as an exemplar of a
good kind of feminism. We might have taken the moment to demonstrate how
Thatcherite policies disproportionately and negatively impact women. Instead,
manarchists called her a “witch.” (Which doesn’t even make sense, people. The
figuration of the witch still cited by our social imaginary emerges
from the symbolics developed by capitalist dudes enclosing commons who had
to deal with various forms of feminine subjectivity that haunted the outskirts
of the proper. Thatcher began life as a commoner, sure, but I don’t think she
was that kind of commoner. Only
structural misogyny, sedimented in our very language, can account for the
bizarre inversion whereby the Dissolver of the Commons can don the symbolic
garb accorded to the victims of such dissolution.)

Getting beyond neoliberal
capitalism requires the production of social forms of care that are defective
for capitalism—not reinscribing a
hierarchical social fabric that, by diminishing the value of women as women, allows them to be positioned as
the proper subjects to take up non-valued, non-monetized, unremunerated, but
utterly necessary care labor. Contesting neoliberalism is great and totally
important, but it’s not some Great Abstract Thing that exists in a relation of
pure exteriority to us. Neoliberalism works because it gloms onto existent
socialities and transforms them into positive externalities. We make it work. Acting
as if the world will be aces once Keynes makes a triumphant return is to ignore
the sad fact that we inhabit and reproduce common worlds utterly functional for
neoliberal accumulation tactics. The violence that inheres in these common
worlds is irreducible to the neoliberal order; structural misogyny preceded this
order and, at the rate we’re going, will survive it, too.

1 comment:

Be the one
said...

This is because neoliberalism thrives on structural misogyny. Gender is one powerful mechanism by which the neoliberal order converts our potentially resistant common worlds into positive externalities, into social formations functional for the maintenance of life in an unlivable world.